Stamp Gallery Online Exhibition: Not Your Model Minority
posted on August 05, 2020
THE STAMP GALLERY PRESENTS
Not Your Model Minority:
Pandemic, Proximity, and Power
Online Exhibition runs August 5 - September 5, 2020
stamp.umd.edu/nymm
Selina Lee, Fox News in Chinese, Video Still.
Not Your Model Minority: Pandemic, Proximity, and Power is a response to the wave of anti-Asian rhetoric and violence surrounding the “Chinese virus” and the critical self-evaluation of Asian American positionality in the movement for Black Lives and earlier histories of Black and Asian solidarities.
In the mid-1900s, Asian Americans, as a group, were labelled as the racial “Model Minority” for their supposed achievement of a higher degree of socioeconomic success in comparison to other racial minority groups, most notably Black Americans. Yet, how can we challenge the idea of race--commonly understood as a socially-constructed notion of difference--as an instrument of empire? Where do Asian Americans fall in relation to other minority groups as a result of larger interrelated struggles of land, labor, and empire?
The five artists in this show engage and subvert assumptions affixed on the racialized and pathologized Asian body-- as perpetual foreigners, consumers in the system of whiteness, newly hypervisible yet historically invisible, submissive, quiet, apolitical, and displaced by United States imperialism and militarization--residing in the American landscape.
Featuring works by Antonius-Tín Bui, stephanie mei huang, payal kumar, Selina Lee, and Nibha Akireddy
Curated by Marjorie Antonio '22
On view at stamp.umd.edu/nymm